Seekers Anonymous

The more deeply I contemplate what is happening in our process of Waking Down in Mutuality, the more deeply it strikes me that what we are doing is providing a path to the end of all addictions. But I am not speaking only of the common addictions to drugs, alcohol, food, sex, and love. I’m speaking of ALL addictions – to habits of attention, strategies of thinking and feeling, and all behaviors which are fundamentally motivated by an attempt to fix or escape the Core Wound. And, forgive me for risking pissing you off, but in case you thought you were personally above all that, I assure you that you are not, no matter who you are or what you have achieved through spiritual practice or realization, 12-step programs, or therapy.

How can I say such a thing, without even knowing you? It’s simple. As far as I can tell, nearly all humans on the planet right now are unawakened in the sense that they are not consciously living as the Onlyness. It appears to me that the only way to maintain the unawakened condition into adulthood is by using addictive strategies to avoid The Pain of Unity. The remaining small fraction of the human population are living some version of what my friends and I consider realized existence, but are working through the long post-awakening purification we call the Wakedown Shakedown. But even awakening into the realization of Onlyness does not stop all addictions; it only starts the end of all addictions. And, even if one has been awakened for decades, the inherent dynamic of the process insures that the advanced realizer will be spontaneously processing the rest of the world’s addictions through his or her own body for the rest of their life. In other words, nobody can be completely free of all addictions until we ALL are. 

I suggest that, until you deeply understand and deeply contemplate in your personal life what Saniel means by the hypermasculine lifeways and conditioning we have inherited from the past 5,000 years or so of cultural history, you cannot grasp the depth and degree of addiction that all humans are currently living under. But if you have begun to see this truth, then you can begin to notice the many ways in which you have personally been addicted to seeking love, happiness, fulfillment, creative expression, comfort, and safety in ways that were fundamentally motivated by avoidance of your own existential discomfort. And I don’t just mean spiritual seeking; I mean every kind of seeking to fix or evade the fundamental Wound of Existence, which is the human condition.

As with substance addiction, for our work to be even attractive, the addicted seeker must first have truly gotten that something is not working; that the basic strategies of seeking we have employed for all our lives did not accomplish our goal. There must be a fundamental deep recognition that whatever we thought our lives were about, however great were our spiritual or worldly achievements, it all amounts to nothing in the place where it really counts: at the core of our feeling of existence.

Imagine trying to sell AA as a path to healing or salvation to anyone who has not seen for themselves the error of their own ways. If you have ever tried preaching to the disinterested, you know it doesn’t work, and it never can. Like the drunk, the addict of seeking strategies (everybody) must simply hit bottom before there is a readiness to awaken. Until the futility of the strategies truly dawns, along with the consequences of a life lived in either active denial or lack of self-recognition, the addict’s loved ones can only stand by helpless, watching the downward spiral of self and other destruction. All the loved ones can really do is learn to stop enabling the pattern from their side, disengage if necessary, and pray for the bottom to be hit with the least unnecessary pain.

As teachers of the White-Hot Way of Mutuality, we have discovered that we cannot sell our path at all, and certainly not to spiritual seekers who are looking to our way as yet another hopeful strategy of avoiding the Core Wound. All we can do is make ourselves available to The Hungry. Sooner or later, the addict must face the long-denied or simply unrecognized fact that this world is REAL, that pain and pleasure are both eternally persistent and inescapable truths, and that we are actually HERE, free and infinitely limitless, while simultaneously bound and hideously reduced to the finite limits of embodied existence. Before this is recognized, all we can do is hope that our subtle or not so subtle waving of red flags gets the seeker’s attention. Or perhaps the seeker feels our persistent and obvious wellness of being, and is mysteriously attracted. Perhaps our attempts at education will help in the process of self-recognition.

The seeker in the pre-self-recognized condition is in a deep bind. He or she is, on some deep level, aware of the entire hell of the dynamic, but does not feel capable of undergoing the intuited even worse hell of becoming free of it. And so there is an endless tussle – on one hand intuiting one’s own dilemma, on the other hand trying desperately to un-know what has already been deeply known or suspected. This sets up a kind of sickening internal struggle; an endless application of gas and brakes either simultaneously or alternately which depletes and debilitates the entire system. Deep in his or her heart, the seeker truly wants to Be Here, but just doesn’t know how.

In our work, the awakening friends and awakened teachers of the addicted seeker feel the depth of the existential tragedy. It is very difficult to endure the pain of the seeker who refuses to feel the pain of his or her unconscious violence to self and others. The addict has a set of survival strategies that not only prevents their own seeing of Reality and the destructive patterns of avoidance, but which also prevent even having the entire picture reflected to them. The amount of energy that is bound up in the subconscious denial, along with the attempts to entice others into agreeing with their highly defended picture of reality, is enormous. If that life energy were freed into a process of increasing self-recognition, the inevitable result would be GodSelf realization.

When even an inkling of the truth of one’s addictions to seeking begins to dawn, the passage we call the Rot has begun. The Rot is like the alcoholic beginning to truly encounter his or her own helpless pattern of drinking, along with its consequences. If you understand that analogy, you can understand why the Rot is not usually a happy chapter in one’s life. Ordinarily, it is attended by feelings of utter despair and helplessness, along with a sudden incapacity to engage life with the old zeal born of the old motivations. For most seekers, the Rot goes unrecognized, for, unlike the pervasive 12-step programs along with widespread cultural understanding of substance addiction, there appears to be currently very few on the planet who truly comprehend this dynamic at the level of the existential dilemma.

But even for those most fortunate seekers who are helped to see what is happening, there comes a real moment of truth. Sooner or later it dawns that, to truly heal, one would have to endure a literal crucifixion of awakening into the harsh realities of life, and then a deeply painful whole-being purification of the old patterns of insanity that are ingrained in every particle at every level of our being. To endure this process (which Saniel has aptly labeled the Wakedown Shakedown) requires heroic courage. Do you possess such courage? Are you willing to go through all of that for the sake of living in the truth of life, straight, sober, and utterly free?

This is similar to the big issue facing the addicted substance abuser. To face the reality of his or her own failed life, the inevitability of the intense pain of detox, and the humiliation of facing significant relationships with the confession of one’s human imperfection requires a deep surrender into a totally new way of being. But for the substance abuser, it is still possible to abstain from the substance addiction while continuing to skirt the deeper existential issues through yet more subtle patterns of self and other evasion. This is why substance abusers can attend 12-step programs for decades and still honestly declare that they are an addict.

For those who are operating at a deeper level, for those who have arrived at a fundamental existential angst with regard to life in its current configuration (and yet still hungering to be fully here), no such subtler option for denial exists. For such souls, there is a fundamental imperative in Being that says something like, “I have done enough of Life to know that there is absolutely nothing further that can tempt me. Not sex, not drugs, not alcohol, not food, not anything. There is no experience, spiritual, emotional, mental, or material, that can possibly hypnotize me into believing that it can bring me the kind of wellness I need. I have nothing left to defend. Nothing short of a complete and radical transformation of my being will suffice. And until that occurs, nothing can truly bring me back to life. I can go on, dragging my body through life, but at the core, I am dead.” For such souls, the White-Hot Way of Mutuality is a bright light in an unrelenting desert of cynicism and despair.

Our Way is like the Seekers Anonymous of 12-step programs. We are a support system for humans who have been addicted to seeking strategies all their lives, and who have begun to Rot. We are here to help you understand and engage the process of whole-Being Self-realization, recovery, and actualization of your unique divinely human gifts.

When a substance abuser permits himself to be treated, he enters a “tank” – a place where the substance is denied, so the body can detoxify itself. In our work, the addicted seeker of hypermasculine lifeways enters what we could call the Tank of Mutuality – a place where there is so much genuine love, permission, and mutual respect, that the previously addicted bodymind begins to spontaneously detoxify itself of its lifetime (and beyond) of hypermasculine conditioning. But, this version of detox is, in many ways, far worse than the other kind and it takes much longer to complete. The good news is that, unlike detox from a substance, the one who endures this passage into awakened freedom is no longer capable of a “relapse”. It appears thus far that, as the deep wounds from the hypermasculine life are healed, they are healed for good.

The Tank of Mutuality is an alchemical chamber of developing divinely human trust. It starts with a recognition by the teacher that the aspirant’s reality is just as true and valid as any other perspective, regardless of how sinful or unworthy the seeker feels. The awakened teacher can see the truth of the infinite divine and the innocence of the limited human in the student, and can therefore sincerely invoke the emerging being in his fullness without pathologizing their natural human imperfections. As the student begins to perceive the honest and deeply embodied love of the teacher, he is able to reciprocate by trusting in the divinely human reality of the teacher. The mutual honoring of each other’s truths permits a flow of love and trust that begins to neutralize the previous patterns of fear and distrust that were part of the addictive patterns. As the love-trust increases, the student awakens into universal non-separation and fundamental wellness of being. This transition into God/Self realization signals the beginning of the end of all addictions.

I propose that all addictions are based on avoidance (or lack of whole-being embodiment) of the Core Wound. The Core Wound is the result of a dis-integration (actually, the unrealized union) of the two primary parts of our being: Absolute Consciousness and Relative Phenomena (especially our own body-mind). The Core Wound carries a basic feeling of separation from others and confusion in identity; it is a felt-sense of fundamental lack, incompletion, tension, anxiety, pressure, or dis-ease at the core of the being. These feelings at the existential core cause the being to seek involuntarily for a solution to this dilemma. It is our very attempts to find an escape or solution to this dilemma that form the basis for our addictions. The White-Hot Way of Mutuality begins with helping each being to notice that we can and must endure living this Wound because it is what we are.

There is nothing wrong either with the fact of the Core Wound or the inevitability of the seeking to heal it. Both are natural expressions of the process of incarnating Being. Because the Core Wound is the inevitable consequence of a human birth, it is not our “fault” that we have been living in it. There is nothing wrong with you or anybody; this primal discomfort we feel at our center is natural. We simply grew up in a world in which everybody was addicted to avoiding it, and transmitting to us (both consciously and unconsciously) that those addictions were normal life. We had no other templates for living here. Therefore, you are forgiven, though no forgiveness is necessary.

It is my deepest wish that this realization of the Wound relieves humanity of all unnecessary suffering and sorrow. May this understanding form the basis of a whole new way of comprehending and treating addictions. And may everyone find the incomparable wellness of Being through awakening into non-separate freedom and love.

(c) 2001 Ted Strauss